Two BAD Bodies

On a sunny, otherwise still Seattle beach, two noticeably fit girls do pushups, giving each other high-fives on the upswing before they power back down to the rocky ground.

In matching Nike pros and stylish sports bras, they do burpees on a park bench and lunges on a platform overlooking the water. They throw medicine balls like beach balls, moving through a perfectly synchronized jumping circuit. They fly over track hurdles higher than their waists and jerk huge barbells stacked with weights. Upbeat music blasts in the background, complimenting their matching movements.

Jennifer Forrester and Kaisa Keranen, both 28, were not always an Instagram sensation, though they now have over 11 thousand followers.

“Our videos are just shot on iPhones,” Forrester said, laughing. “And by our family members. It’s really a family effort.” Rather than staging a workout for the camera, they show-up to get their sweat on, do a few takes and keep moving. The videos do feature matching workout outfits, most of which Forrester said they separately owned but certainly coordinate.

“We do love women’s fitness fashion, too,” Forrester said. “When you look good, you feel good and it helps with training. We like it because that’s our way of letting our personalities show.”

In their videos, they always move in synch, but not just for the benefit of the camera. Fitness is their shared passion and working out is always a joint activity.

“We have more of an athletic approach to working out,” Forrester said. “It’s about creating a lifestyle and a balance.”

Forrester and Keranen met in in college, they were track teammates at The University of Washington. Forrester was a sprinter; Keranen did the heptathlon, which combines seven track and field events from hurdles to javelin throws over two days in a meet. They started working out together in the post-college gap left by track and field and, over they years, have built their workouts around what makes them feel best. Both went on to start their own businesses as personal trainers in Seattle.

For these “bad bodies,” a name coined by a friend’s joke that stuck, working out seems to be a joint effort built on friendship as well as a love of fitness. While they no longer race and neither ran competitively after graduation, they’re still athletes, and their attitude toward fitness shows it.

“Neither of us work out to look a certain way,” Keranen said. “I think it’s kind of the opposite of what a lot of people do, but we work out to feel a certain way. The product of that is how we look.”

Their workouts feature many bodyweight workouts, like lunge and squat matrices for full-body movement, with track and weightlifting exercises scattered throughout their Instagram feed. Keranen loves Olympic weight lifting and Forrester is a huge advocate of the beauty of upper body strength- her favorite move is push-ups.

“It’s all about keeping it light and fun,” Keranen said. “We kind of developed our own method of how we liked to train and what made us feel the best.” If the women are working out, it’s always together, and they usually train five or six days a week.

“We’ve worked out together for so long we’re really good at holding ourselves accountable and pushing when we need to be pushed,” Keranen said.

Their Instagram, which they started on May 1, was the first time they’d really shared their workouts with anyone but each other.

The focus on feeling good is palpable on their Instagram feed, scattered with inspirational quotes, healthy meals and outtake pictures of the duo laughing between shots. The message is clear: don’t take fitness too seriously. Have fun and do it for you.

“We just want people to be empowered,” Keranen said. “A lot of what our culture thinks looks great ultimately isn’t healthy or attainable. It should be about feeling good in your own skin.”